Xaprb

This 35-minute video from the recent Google I/O conference explains how to use Go’s concurrency primitives — goroutines, channels, and the select statement — to do things elegantly, correctly, and safely in a few lines of Go, which would otherwise turn your brain into a pretzel in most programming languages.

My favorite thing about Go is that a good Go program looks self-evident and obvious, even when it may be doing things that would be insanely complex in another language. Callbacks, closures, mutexes, and so on just disappear, and the program itself emerges, looking completely unimpressive. In many cases I think “what’s the big deal about that?” until I realize how hard it would be to write in Java, or Perl, or so on. A lot of the code in Percona Toolkit, for example, involved “pipelines” of callbacks passing data along to other callbacks for further processing. These were hard to reason about, hard to make resilient to errors and allow clean termination, and were redesigned several times, never very successfully in my opinion. In Go, channels make those kinds of tasks so simple. Such a program in Go looks suspiciously like a Unix | pipe | and | filter | program. If you think about it, the Unix shell itself is a great example of using “channels” successfully to trivialize what would otherwise be a migraine-inducing task.

I’m scheduled to talk about Go a couple times in the upcoming weeks.

The first is May 4th in Arlington at A Day Of Foster.ly. I’ll be a participant in a panel titled Add To Your Programming Toolkit: Languages You Should Know About (Erlang, Clojure, R, Go, etc…). I’m talking about Go, naturally.

The second May 7th is at my local technology guild, the Neon Guild. I’m going to be giving a “gentle introduction” to Go. I’ve been programming in Go for less than a year, so my first impressions are still fresh. If you are in the Charlottesville area and you haven’t been to a Neon Guild meeting, do yourself a favor and show up. It’s free and no RSVP is required. Description:

It seems that every time I tell someone we’ve chosen Go as our primary language at VividCortex, they respond with something like “I’ve heard about Go! Neat! What is it like? Why did you choose it? Are you happy with it?” The answer is that Go is a fascinating language that’s working great for us. After many years of programming in everything from C to Java to C# to Perl to LISP to Shell, I’m pretty much in love with Go. There are particular reasons I chose it for our special use case, but beyond just niche considerations, it’s working great as a general-purpose, high-performance, very productive systems language. I’ll try to contain my enthusiasm and tell a story about evaluating it, learning it, and then learning it more deeply.

I hope to see you at one of these events. If you see me, wave and introduce yourself, and give me a business card so I can stalk connect with you on LinkedIn!

I was a guest on the Food Fight Show last week, along with a bevy of really smart people asking and answering tough questions on fault detection. We didn’t talk a lot about MySQL, but given that VividCortex is focusing on MySQL initially, pretty much all of my experience with zero-threshold, zero-configuration fault detection is MySQL-based.

It’s a fun conversation with a lot of insights into the industry, what’s wrong with current monitoring tools, and where monitoring is going. Also, it’s sold out now, but Monitorama is a conference you might be interested in if you’re doing monitoring (and who isn’t?)